How the States Got Their Shapes Too_ The People Behind the Borderlines - Mark Stein [155]
As a young lawyer, Norton worked for the American Civil Liberties Union, where she first began to get national attention. Ebony magazine wrote of her in 1969:
In her Afro hairstyle, her dangling earrings and her multi-colored striped dress … Eleanor Holmes Norton hardly looks like what she is—an astute constitutional lawyer who has argued controversial cases before the Supreme Court and won. But there is a certain irony in a number of her victories.… [S]he has … defended the free speech of George C. Wallace, the segregationist National States Rights Party, and individual klansmen.
For Norton, civil rights transcended race and political views. Rather, she saw them as inseparably connected to humanity’s inalienable rights. This deeply held conviction drew the attention of New York Mayor John V. Lindsay. “Eleanor Holmes Norton, a civil liberties lawyer, was appointed chairman of the city’s Commission on Human Rights yesterday,” the New York Times reported in 1970. “As head of the city’s principal antidiscrimination agency, Mrs. Norton, who is 32 years old, will also be the highest ranking Negro woman in Mr. Lindsay’s administration.” Norton’s achievements during her seven years in New York brought her to the attention of others as well. In 1977 President Jimmy Carter chose Norton to head the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.
In 1990, when Washington, DC’s delegate to Congress retired, Norton (now a law professor at Georgetown University) sought and won election to the position. Once in office, she took up the torch that had been carried by a long line of predecessors: equal representation for the District of Columbia.
Following President Monroe’s 1818 call to rectify the status of the District, its residents had created a committee to propose solutions. “The Committee confesses that they can discover but two modes in which the desired relief can be afforded,” it reported back to Congress in 1822, continuing “either by the establishment of a territorial government … restoring them to equal rights enjoyed by the citizens of the other portions of the United States, or by a retrocession to the States of Virginia and Maryland of the respective parts of the District which were originally ceded by those States to form it.”4 Neither idea was new, ideal, or favorably received.
The problem then went dormant until 1841, when it was picked up again by President William Henry Harrison. “It is in this District only where American citizens are to be found who … are deprived of many important political privileges,” he declared in his inaugural address. “The people of the District of Columbia are not the subjects of the people of the States, but free American citizens. Being in the latter condition when the Constitution was formed, no words used in that instrument could have been intended to deprive them of that character.” Unfortunately for District residents, Harrison died one month later.
In 1846 the issue was resolved for those District residents living on the Virginia side of the Potomac. That year, Congress returned that portion of the city to Virginia (see “Robert M. T. Hunter” in this book).
In 1888 New Hampshire Senator Henry W. Blair proposed an amendment to the Constitution to provide voting representation for the District of Columbia. The Senate voted it down. He was followed in 1918 by Illinois Senator James Hamilton Lewis. “The United States is the only country in the world that exiles it own National Capital,” Lewis wrote in a Washington Post column proposing statehood for the District. “The federal government could reserve a sufficient area for all federal buildings and reserve governmental control over all the area, just as it does now over military posts.” Senator Lewis’s efforts went nowhere as well. His statehood proposal was followed by that of Texas Representative Hatton Sumners in 1940. Sumners’s was followed